Egypt says search for crashed EgyptAir plane narrows

Associated Press

Published 1:53 pm, Friday, May 27, 2016

CAIRO — The search for the EgyptAir plane which crashed last week killing all 66 people on board has narrowed to a 3-mile-wide area in the Mediterranean Sea, based on signals from the craft’s emergency beacon, Egypt’s chief investigator said.

The chief investigator, Ayman al-Moqadem, said late Thursday that Airbus had given Egyptian authorities information on the Emergency Locator Transmitter, or ELT, from the doomed aircraft.

An official from the Egyptian investigation team on Friday clarified that the beacon information was from the day of the crash, May 19, and that no new signal had been found. An Airbus official said he was unaware of any ELT received or given to the Egyptians.

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The ELT’s signal is too weak to transmit information from underwater, unlike the locator pings emitted by the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as the black box. Al-Moqadem stressed that the black boxes have not been found, which he said requires highly sophisticated technology. But he said the search was now being conducted in a 3-miles area.

A French naval oceanographic research ship, Laplace, carrying a long-range acoustic system able to detect signals from the black box is headed to the crash site, France’s air accident investigation agency, the BEA, said in a statement. The ship left Corsica on Thursday and was due to reach the crash area on Sunday or Monday, it said.

Eight days after the plane crashed off Egypt’s northern coast on a Paris to Cairo flight, the cause of the tragedy still has not been determined.

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